


25 Things Fraser Never Told Anyone

by justbreathe80



Category: due South
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-14
Updated: 2009-12-14
Packaged: 2017-10-04 10:19:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justbreathe80/pseuds/justbreathe80
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The title says it all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	25 Things Fraser Never Told Anyone

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to brooklinegirl for the beta and the sense-making, and holding my hand during our mutual time of writing trial.

1\. Fraser never thought he'd join the RCMP. He never wanted to. In fact, he could remember when his father came home, when he was twelve or thirteen, and how Fraser hated the red serge with everything he could muster. It signified every minute that his father was absent. The truth was, in the end, he became a Mountie because he wanted to be the kind of Mountie his father wasn't. Dedicated to duty, but able to find the time for something else. Someone else. Most days, he worried that he was more like his father than he cared to be.

2\. Fraser wasn't sure he loved his grandparents. He supposed he had the kind of obligatory love for family that he was expected to have, but he never really had a depth of feeling for them. He was extraordinarily grateful to them for taking care of him for all of those years, for putting food on the table and roof over his head, and teaching him any number of things. But George and Martha Fraser were not affectionate, and Fraser wasn't sure there could be love without any touch.

3\. Fraser fell in love for the first time at age thirteen. It was really quite desperate and pathetic, in hindsight, but he was smitten. Mark Smithbauer was everything Fraser wasn't at that age. People _liked_ Mark, and Fraser was just another one among them, even though Mark asked Fraser to play hockey with him after school most days that year. The night before Fraser left town, he was at Mark's house, and when he went to shake Mark's hand, to say goodbye, Mark pulled him in for a hug and kissed him, his hands warm and soft on Fraser's cheeks. He carried that moment with him for a very long time.

4\. Fraser was insufferable, for a period of time. He knew that many people felt he was insufferable _all_ of the time, well into adulthood, but Fraser could look back on grade nine and ten as a time where he could not honestly believe that anyone put up with him at all. He raised his hand every single time a teacher asked a question, and was convinced that there was nothing on Earth that he didn't know better than anyone. It took realizing that none of his peers were speaking to him anymore for him to start to alter his behavior, even though he never stopped being somewhat outside of the group for far longer.

5\. Fraser had sex with three girls in high school. Mary Carter, Jane Aariak, and Jenny Sharp. Attention from women was never something of which he experienced a shortage and, when he was in high school, he didn't know better to be cautious about how often he received it. He'd been dating Mary Carter for a few months when her parents went out for an evening to Yellowknife and she invited him over. She broke up with him after a while, but then Jane Aariak took him out in her father's Jeep one afternoon and he found himself in the backseat with her, fumbling through her layers. Jenny Sharp was his lab partner in science class, and, one warm afternoon in May, she dragged him behind the school building and pressed him up against the metal wall.

6\. Fraser enjoyed sex with women, and knew, as a teenage boy with normal urges, he would have been stupid to turn it down, but he knew what he'd want if he had his choice: Jack Harper.

7\. His time at the Depot was incredibly difficult. He didn't fit in, he wasn't accepted by his peers, and he excelled at everything. Fraser knew that his classmates talked about him behind his back (an upside or downside, really, of his exceptional hearing) and none of them made an effort to get to know him. So he stopped trying, too. He breathed a deep sigh of relief the day he graduated and moved back to the north, because there, there was no one for whom to try.

8\. Sometimes, Fraser got cold. Bone-deep, aching cold, that he couldn't chase off with a well built fire and a scalding cup of tea. There would be nights where he wrapped himself in extra shirts and blankets and sat close to the stove, and still shivered with his arms wrapped around his chest. When he lived in Chicago, he wore more than was necessary for the weather, because sometimes it felt sinfully good to be so warm.

9\. Fraser was lonely. Deep down, in his gut. Not just wishing for someone to talk to, but craving touch. Craving someone to come home to at the end of the day, who was _human_, and sometimes the sheer enormity of how alone he was made him stagger under its weight.

10\. He was in love with one of the constables at his first posting. Constable Jane Elmore. She was about ten years older than Fraser, and she had a long, brown hair, in a ponytail down the back of her brown uniform, and she smiled, flashing her bright, white teeth, all the time. Fraser fantasized about telling her how he felt, and the thought of her being at the detachment carried him through the long nights while out on patrol. A year later, she transferred to Saskatoon, and Fraser clasped his hands behind his back, at parade rest, as she walked out of the detachment door for the last time.

11\. Fraser almost let Victoria go the first time. And turning her in was still one of the hardest things he had ever done. The piercing look in her eyes, the memory of her cold skin under his fingers, her hands at his lips. Sometimes duty was a heavy weight that he wasn't sure he could bear.

12\. Diefenbaker didn't really talk. Which seemed like a sort of obvious thing to say, but he knew that people thought he was quite crazy, and that he really thought his deaf half-wolf talked to him. He was neither crazy nor was Diefenbaker capable of speech, but it afforded him a protection, of sorts, to carve out a world where he spoke to Diefenbaker, and where Diefenbaker spoke to him. It may have been unfair to perpetrate the lie, but he felt guilty of nothing except loneliness. And they communicated, in their own way, without words.

13\. Fraser was incredibly angry with his father. Deeply, overwhelmingly filled with rage. He hated the man for so many things: for never being there, for not loving his mother enough, for leaving Fraser with his grandparents, and for dying. The bastard. And most of all, he hated him for leaving Fraser with nothing at all.

14\. He never cried, not truly, when his father died. He felt struck when he heard the news, as would be expected, but mostly he felt angry, at his father and at whoever had shot him, and surprisingly _numb_. He threw himself fully into finding the killers of this father because he didn't want to face how he couldn't really shed a tear for the man.

15\. Fraser actually liked Chicago. It was, of course, overwhelming. Huge and loud and busy and cluttered and full of smells and sounds and sights that Fraser had only ever seen in pictures or movies, never anywhere else. But there was something of a vastness about it, an ability to lose one's self in the maze of streets dwarfed by tall buildings, and he sometimes longed for the emptiness of the Arctic, but often, he found it easier to hide here in the city.

16\. He was tempted to sleep with Francesca. It appalled to him to consider it, because he felt very much like he was taking advantage, but Francesca was a beautiful woman, and sometimes Fraser wondered what it would be like to give in and let himself get lost in the soft warmth of her body, if only for a night.

17\. Fraser was leaving with Victoria, that day at the train station. He'd let her go once, and despite knowing her true nature, he also knew, with absolute certainty, that she loved him. He wasn't like his father; he would give all of this up - being a Mountie, his friendship with Ray, everything - to make things right with her and never have to let her go again. He was almost _grateful_ when he felt the sharp, hot pain of the bullet ripping through his back, because it meant that it wasn't his choice.

18\. Ray Vecchio's style made Fraser's head hurt, when they first met, and there were days when Ray would show up and Fraser would have to shut his eyes tightly against the onslaught. Bright colors and hideously unnatural fabrics. He was glad when Ray's style slowly changed, glad of the softer colors and matte fabrics, and the way they felt under his fingers the first time he removed those clothes in the dark silence of his apartment.

19\. He cried, the way he never had for his father, the day he realized Ray Vecchio was not returning. He remembered the warmth that pooled in his belly when Ray called him, climbing to the top of the telephone pole and having to hold on tightly with his shaking hands just at the sound of Ray's voice. There was so much that they weren't saying, but perhaps Ray was somewhere he could not speak freely. Fraser had been perfectly content to see his way from the airport to the precinct, and had almost lost it when some strange man, blond and restless and entirely unfamiliar, had embraced him. He knew, as he desperately tried to prove that this Ray Vecchio was _not_ Ray Vecchio in the least, what had really happened. In the back of his head, he knew, almost crushingly, that Ray had left. Left him. And that night, after he had dinner with this new Ray, who seemed to be an excellent police officer, he let himself into the Consulate and wept until the sun came up.

20\. Ray Kowalski was, in many ways, a better police officer than Fraser was. This was Fraser's most closely guarded secret, because his absolute confidence was part of his persona, and he leaned on that falsehood to get him through difficult cases and times where it seemed the answer, the solution would never come. Ray went with his gut, and it was admirable, because, at the heart of it, they had to understand people in order to do their jobs, and Fraser knew that people, so very often, flew directly in the face of logic.

21\. Fraser had to talk himself down from losing his mind at the Consulate, constantly. He did a worse job of hiding this fact than most things about himself, because he lost his patience with Turnbull on an almost hourly basis, and he found himself practically scurrying from the building the moment he could be spared to go to the 27th. Without his work there, he would certainly have gone insane. Or, at least more insane than people already thought he was.

22\. He fell in love with Ray Kowalski, at least a little bit, during that first hug. Certainly, he was a bit put off at the time, but he knew that, looking back, the hug was exactly what he needed in that moment, someone else's arms wrapped tightly around him and their breath in his ear, giving comfort for no reason at all. Or maybe that was the moment he realized that he could live without Ray Vecchio, but regardless, he fell a little further for Ray Kowalski every day, and chided himself for his hopelessness, and propensity for having feelings for the precisely wrong people.

23\. There was no way that what happened on the _Henry Allen_ was buddy breathing. It served the purpose of buddy breathing, but putting his hands on Ray's face and pressing their cold lips together under the water was nothing but Fraser, desperate for one opportunity to show Ray how he felt. When it became clear that they would survive, and Ray asked him what he was doing with his lips, he pathetically fumbled for an answer he thought Ray would believe, and not question, despite its stupidity. Fraser was a coward, but he didn't want to risk this partnership that was turning out to be the best relationship he'd ever had. Even though he heard in Ray's question something that made him hope.

24\. Fraser had really wanted to kill Muldoon. More than he wanted to kill Gerard or anyone else in his entire life. They were down at the bottom of that mine shaft, and he could have done it, right there, with his bare hands. Called it self defense, called it nothing if he didn't damn well please. He didn't think there was a soul in Canada, or all of the North America, who would have blamed him or made him pay for it. In the end, he couldn't do it, but it was much more for his own sake than Muldoon's. He wasn't sure he could live with the blood on his hands, and he had something, someone to live for. Muldoon could rot in prison and think about what he had done every day for the rest of his life.

25\. He would have stayed in Chicago, for Ray. Part of him was more than willing, and able, to do it. But even Ray knew, just by looking at Fraser, that night sitting by the campfire, that Fraser didn't want to go back, even if Chicago had come to be a home of sorts to him. So Ray didn't ask Fraser to come back, and Fraser didn't say he would. That night, they went inside the tent, and Fraser almost protested as Ray stripped down and shimmied into Fraser's sleeping bag with him. Ray's face was close, and Fraser could barely make out the lines of his cheek in the dark. "Ask me," Ray said, wrapping his leg around the back of Fraser's knees. "I need you to say it." Fraser swallowed heavily and let his eyes drift closed. He'd never asked for anything he wanted, never in his whole life. He never asked for any of it, and yet he felt like his cup was full to brimming, and maybe running over. This was more than he deserved, but he was going to reach out and grab it and hold on, as long as he could. "Stay."


End file.
